Mandy Hale - You Are Enough: Heartbreak, Healing, and Becoming Whole

Copyright 2018 by Amanda Hale

Cover photographs of sunflower: Kevin Summers/Getty Images.
Cover illustration of abstract floral silhouettes: Marabird/Getty Images.
Cover copyright 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

FaithWords
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
faithwords.com
twitter.com/faithwords

First Edition: October 2018

FaithWords is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The FaithWords name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call
(866) 376-6591.

Scriptures noted ( MSG ) are taken from The Message. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scriptures noted ( NIV ) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hale, Mandy, 1978- author.
Title: You are enough : heartbreak, healing, and becoming whole / Mandy Hale.
Description: first [edition]. | New York : Faith Words, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021725| ISBN 9781546012344 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781549171109 (audio download) | ISBN 9781546012368 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Christian women--Religious life. | Self-esteem in
women--Religious aspects--Christianity.
Classification: LCC BV4527 .H342 2018 | DDC 248.8/43--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021725

ISBNs: 978-1-5460-1234-4 (hardcover), 978-1-5460-1236-8 (ebook), 978-1-5460-1089-0 (B&N edition)

E3-20191217-PDJ-PC-DPU

For anyone who has ever wondered if you matter, if your life serves a purpose, or if you are enough:

You do. It does. YOU ARE.

Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

You are a semicolon; you are not a period.

E nough.

What a concept.

Fitting. Sufficient. Adequate. Acceptable. Complete. Not lacking. ENOUGH.

Whatever that sense of okayness is that some people are born withwell, Ive never had it. Ive never felt like I quite measured up to everyone else. From the time I was a little girl, I struggled with not feeling worthy: worthy of friendships, of opportunities, of love. (The great irony being that my full name means worthy-of-love princess.)

This sense of lack has followed me my entire life and has impacted me in both negative and positive ways. Negatively, because its led to me choosing wrong people to love and staying in friendships and situations that were not honoring to me, long after I should have walked away. Positively, because when you carry around an innate sense of unworthiness, you tend to hustle for your worth. Work a little harder than everyone else just to prove that you are valuable, you are important, you are ENOUGH. In that respect, my constant need to prove myself has made me a go-getter, and some incredible career opportunities have come to me as a result of my tenacity.

But through it alleven when working alongside Oprah and speaking at the biggest church in the country and hitting the New York Times best-seller listI carried around this shadow of lack and insecurity and unworthiness. This taunting, cruel shadow that was always one step behind me, making sure to remind me that no matter how far I rose in life, I would never rise high enough to outrun it. I would never really earn my stripes. I would never be ENOUGH.

ThenI wound up in a mental hospital, and everything changed.

A mental hospital. Lets keep it real, folks. By societys standards (not mine), this is possibly the very lowest of the low places. And although I have experienced it firsthand and know that the people within those walls are some of the best Ive ever encountered, those who have no experience with mental illness or depression or treatment or recovery view it with fear and judgment and even distaste. We as a people have a habit of coping with things we dont understand with defense mechanisms like mockery and criticism and cruelty. (Which is incredibly unfortunate and a tendency that we, collectively, as humans, need to fight with everything we have.)

The prior year of my life leading up to the mental hospital was without a doubt the most disappointing and challenging and heartbreaking year. Up to that point, I had prided myself, as many people do, on an ability to bounce back. To roll with the punches. To get back up and try, try again. But somewhere in the midst of family tragedy and career disappointment and relationship failures, I lost my ability to persevere. I lost the essence of who I was. It was all mired in the life-i-ness of life. I simply woke up one morning and couldnt take another step.

So thats how I found myselfa writer whose message was all about inspiration and hope and positivitycompletely bereft of all of those things and struggling to get out of bed and live my life. Struggling to the point where I had to enroll in an intensive outpatient program at a mental hospital for crippling anxiety and depression.

Rock bottom, it would seem.

But, as it turns out, it was that very rock bottom that became the firmest foundation I had ever planted my feet on. A foundation so solid it finally provided the springboard I needed to outrun that teasing, taunting shadow of unworthiness that had followed me my entire life.

Sometimes it takes getting pushed to the very edge before you can find your voice and courage to speak out again. Sometimes it takes hitting that rock bottom to realize youre done descending and its time to rise. Sometimes it takes being told youre nothingbeing made to feel like youre nothingto help you see that you are complete.

YOU. ARE. ENOUGH.

You see, sometimes you have to realize that youve HAD enough to realize that you ARE enough.

Over these past two years, Ive seen just how closely those two principles are intertwined: the rock bottom and the soaring heightsthe valley and the mountaintopthe agony of defeat and the thrill of victory. How sometimes it takes great heartbreak to find great healing and even greater wholeness. How being told how unworthy you are of great love and happiness and beauty and light can actually help you see once and for all just how worthy you really are. Just how deserving you are of the things and the life that you dream of and hope for, and how nothing you could ever do or not do takes away from your worthiness or your enoughness.

Over the course of a year and a half, I descended into total darkness. I was told I never meant anything to someone Id loved for a decade. I lost people I lovedone, tragically, to suicide. I had my heart broken more than once. I sat in total silence in front of a blank screen for hours on end, waiting for words to pour out of me that seemed would never come. I questioned everything about myself: my faith, my judgment, my friendships, my career path, my worth, my value, my purpose. My LIFE.